


Dirty Dan the Filth Man Fights the Plague and Wins

by ZestyMelon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Based on an oc twitter rp character I made as a joke, But it's very much, Canon-Typical Corruption, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Please read the content warnings :), Seriously this gets pretty gross, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23657905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZestyMelon/pseuds/ZestyMelon
Summary: "Determining the point at which I first began serving the Filth is a task I find impossible. From my earliest memories, I can recall feeling a certain kinship with the things others threw away."Statement of Daniel Foster regarding his origins, and his hatred of the being known as John Amherst.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Dirty Dan the Filth Man Fights the Plague and Wins

**Author's Note:**

> Haha ok cool cw for: Discussion of a pandemic, death of a parent due to illness, graphic depiction of illness, general Corruption stuff including bugs, trypophobia, and other gross stuff you may not want to read about before eating. Happy trails! Lol but for real though this shit is nasty and I’m almost kind of sorry about it.

Statement of Daniel “Dirty Dan” Foster regarding his origins, and his hatred of the being known as John Amherst.

Statement begins:

People will sometimes ask me how I “became” what I am. I’ve never liked this framing. In all the ways that matter, I have always belonged to my god, just as it has always worked through me -- and through you, know it or not. I think it’s true that the fears exist perpetually within all mankind. Every life is born under the shadow of death, for instance, and every point of consciousness balances only precariously on what we might call sanity. But I like to think that my god has a unique claim on the soul of humanity. See, fighting the Filth is much like fighting entropy. Man exerts an enormous energy scrubbing and sweeping and grooming and throwing away, but even if he does this, even if he never slows, never wavers in his efforts against us, he will inevitably die and waste and rot and become Filth as was always his fate. What is Filth? I’ve asked myself this question many times, and the only answer that satisfies me is this that, at the core of it, Filth is what humanity attempts to rid itself of. But that doesn’t mean it goes away.

So determining the point at which I first began serving my god is a task I find impossible. From my earliest memories I can recall feeling a certain kinship with those things others discarded. I grew up very poor, the son of a single mother with no family and no means to speak of. From the time I was very young I would help her pick through piles of other people’s rubbish for just about anything we could use or repurpose. I know intellectually that others in my situation would have felt shame at having to perform such a task, though I simply cannot conceive of being driven to such a feeling. Rather, “picking”, as my mother always called it, was by far my favorite chore as a boy. I took pride in my ability to spot what others had overlooked, and in my creativity in imagining new lives for objects that could not carry out their original functions. More than that, though, I found a strange beauty in the refuse. It offered glimpses into the lives of others, a broken chair showcasing the boisterousness of a neighbor’s young son, or a torn rag the evidence of a violent row between spouses. There was something else I liked about it too, and that was the time it allowed me to share with my mother.

By contrast, chores of fighting Filth were dreadful to me. Even compared to other boys my age, I’d always loathed bathing. The one bath my mother insisted I take each month was a miserable affair for both of us, as I threw wild tantrums well past the age that such a thing might be acceptable. I had no interest in washing my hands or clothes, and no stomach for killing the pests that crawled their way into our home. To the extent I did any cleaning whatsoever, it was only because I knew that not doing so would upset my mother and make her ashamed of me. Still, she was so busy providing for us when I was young that I could avoid these tasks for far longer than most children.

This was one reason I grew up shunned by my peers, many of whom were convinced the miasma that followed me everywhere would cause them to be sick. The other, and I suspect the main reason, were the circumstances of my birth. I recall well the whispers I overheard from adults concerning the wantonness of my mother, and speculations about my father, a foreigner, who had abandoned her so soon after I was born. The jeers hurled at me by other children, that I was a bastard, devil’s spawn, unwanted by my father and by their god, helpfully filled in the rest of the story for me. My mother and I never talked properly about it, though I know she suffered for this supposed sin. I could see it in the way she hid her face from the stares and sneers of her fellows. And I know she worried over me, the way I never made friends, and refused to accompany her to church services where I knew she felt our community’s judgement most acutely. She needn’t have worried, though, as I was never an unhappy child. I would say I learned how to enjoy my own company, but that isn’t really true. All the childhood activities I took comfort in, catching rats for the neighbors, playing outdoors in the dirt, talking to cockroaches as they crawled up and down my arms, in all of them I can now recognize the companionship I already shared with the Filth.

So despite the hardship, my mother and I enjoyed the little life we had together. It was only the arrival of John Amherst that ruined it forever.

I do not know if he was called John Amherst at the time, as he never gave his name to me, and I’ve only come to know him as such in the many intervening years since. Initially, I thought of him simply as the peculiar stranger who came to our little village needing lodging.

It was early spring in the year 1348 when he came to us. Stories had reached us by then of a Great Pestilence that was ravaging the port cities of Italy, where it had moved on to Spain, and even the Pope’s very home in Avignon as it crawled ever northwards. As yet, however, the Plague had not reached the fair shores of England, where it would eventually wreak the same death and destruction that already had already brought Europe to the brink of total ruin. It’s interesting, back then we didn’t know half of what we know about disease. At that time, the best minds of the age were convinced that Plague was spread literally through foul smells -- miasma. It’s why those Plague doctor costumes, the ones everyone now is so enamored with, have those long beaks attached to the masks. They were meant to hold all sorts of flowers, herbs; pleasant smelling things intended to ward off illness. It didn’t work, of course. But sometimes belief in a thing makes it real, at least in a way.

When John Amherst arrived, you could literally see the miasma floating off him, green and hazy as it choked the air right out of your lungs. Flies buzzed atop the cloud lazily, as if all they needed to do was open their wings and let the putrid smell rising off him bolster them aloft. His clothes were in poor condition. They looked to be moth-bitten old things, the sort a rich man leaves rotting in the back of his closet as he dons only his most fashionable attire. But just looking at him it was clear that Amherst could only own one set of clothes. He was easily the tallest man I’d ever seen, and his head poked out of the haze like a lighthouse standing above the fog as it rolls in gently off the sea. Childishly, I wondered if his height was the reason he seemed so unaware of the small crowd of rats and insects keeping pace with his bare feet. He strode into our village empty handed, which was odd to me, as any stranger I’d ever seen would at least carry with him a small sack to hold whatever meals he needed to sustain himself through his travels. But despite his clear lack of means, Amherst walked like a man with purpose, unworried by the ugly glares my neighbors sent him as he passed them by. I was instantly enamored of him.

Some of this opinion must have shown on my face, as he approached me directly and asked where a weary traveller might find suitable lodging, just for a night or two. My thoughts turned instantly to Mrs. Spencer, a neighbor who ran a small inn at the edge of the village. It was a place my mother sometimes worked in the summer months when larger groups of people came passing through town. However, Mrs. Spencer was rather hostile towards me, having more than once thrown me by the ear out of her establishment for being “an unwashed little devil”. Lovely woman. I reasoned that Amherst would likewise be turned away by her, and anyway even if she would tolerate him in return for his patronage, I was not inclined to direct any customers her way. So instead, I grinned up at him and asked if he might like to stay at my mother’s house for the evening. Amherst smiled down at me, showing off a row of brown and broken teeth, and told me he would appreciate that immensely.

I wonder if you know the actual symptoms of the Plague. Most of the time I hear it talked about these days, it’s always in regards to the amount of death it caused. Between one and two thirds of the population of Europe. It’s certainly an impressive statistic. And that’s the whole population. The death rate among those who contracted the plague was far higher even than that. But death on its own isn’t impressive, at least to me. I mean, all those people would hardly be alive now anyway, so what does it matter what got them, if it was illness, or violence, or the slow, peaceful decay of age? But Plague is a particularly horrible way to go. In the end, that’s why all those deaths are remembered, because we’ve all accepted at some point that death is inevitable. It’s dying badly that I think most people truly fear. It’s the fear of slow, agonizing suffering, dragging us towards our ultimate destination far sooner than we expected, than it needed to be.

Well the first thing to be clear about is that calling it “the Plague” is a bit inaccurate. What we thought of as one great pestilence, sent by a vengeful god to punish humanity for its wickedness, was actually three distinct diseases. Most common was the bubonic plague, named for the boboes, those small tumors that appeared on the neck, groin, and armpits, which typically signaled the start of the illness. Next would come fever, weakness, and nausea, and within a week of infection the sufferer would die vomiting their own blood. More deadly is the pneumonic plague, a form of the disease that affects the lungs most specifically. Those with this variant would first experience small tinges of red in the phlegm brought up by a powerful cough. In the end, the coughing would only stop when the blood flowed freely from the lungs, choking and bleeding the poor soul dry all at once. The most deadly form of plague was septicemic, though among these it was the least common. It’s an infection of the blood, distinct from other forms of plague in that it causes its victims to bleed from the mouth, nose, and even under the skin. It also inflicts gangrene, causing one’s extremities to blacken where the skin tissue dies. One small mercy is that the septicemic plague is also the most rapid, and many who contracted it died before even experiencing symptoms. What John Amherst brought to my home and my mother’s was not the Plague. I believe what he brought us was far worse.

The symptoms came on fast. The three of us -- my mother, Amherst, and myself -- had just sat down to a modest supper when I felt myself begin to sweat. I held my hand up to my forehead, and yanked it away when the heat nearly scalded me. I noticed then that the light conversation my mother and Amherst had been carrying had stopped. Looking to her, I saw my mother was shaking violently, her lips blue as though from a terrible chill.

From there, my memory becomes somewhat unreliable. I know we ended up in the bed we shared together, sweating and shivering in turn beneath the old woolen blanket that was by far our most extravagant possession. I can’t say for sure how my mother suffered. Though we were together the whole time, my perception could hardly extend beyond my own body, which had become a battleground between myself and this unnatural pestilence. I think I must have reached out to her at times, looking to ground myself, to find that support she had always given me. But she was fighting her own battle, and if I did manage the near insurmountable task of lifting my hand to place it in hers, then I know for certain it gave me no comfort.

The fever was intense. Unpredictably it bounced me between feeling so cold I could barely hear myself think over the noise of my chattering teeth, to the next feeling so hot it was as though my clothes burned me where they met my flesh. Next came the buboes, which looked to me like sores that spread from my neck to cover my face, arms, and hands. At that point I started vomiting. I didn’t recognize my supper in what I retched up, and it was only much later that I realized I hadn’t even eaten anything before the abrupt onset of fever caused me to leave my meal untouched. What did come up was rancid, foul smelling in a way I can’t describe to you, but was slimy and brown, the color of old sewage. It went on for hours, the sheer volume of it far exceeding what is physically possible for the human stomach to hold. After a while, I was experiencing excruciating pain in my throat and abdomen from the simple exertion of vomiting. Sometime during all of this, the blisters covering my skin began to change. Some of them opened in an eruption of yellow, oozing pus. Others became sunken and turned a rotten green, resembling in my mind tiny, algae-ridden swamps. Then there was the blood. You know, I’m not even sure where it came from, what injury or orifice; perhaps it simply seeped out of me, like water from damp soil when it's trodden on by a heavy boot. I just slowly became aware of it, covering my body as it was in a thin, hazy sheen, mixing easily with the sweat and pus as they met like paint on an artist’s palette.

By this point, the blisters covered my entire body. Some of them were red, angry and fresh, where others looked old and rotten. It was inspecting these older ones where I first noticed the maggots crawling in and out of my flesh. The skin where they dug had a strange quality to it, spongey I remember thinking, and by the color I have to assume that it was long dead. I would say the sight of it all made me vomit, but by then I didn’t exactly need a reason. The maggots, though, I wondered how long they’d been there. I wondered how long I’d been there, laying plague-ridden in my own filth. Bubonic plague, the slowest, takes up to a week to kill a person if left untreated. I don’t see how I could have been there longer than a week. My mother and I lived alone, and certainly neither of us had the sorts of connections that would lead anyone to check in on us and nurse us through our sickness. So with no one looking after us, no one bringing us food or water, no one to empty our chamber pot or change the straw on our bed, it’s simply impossible we could have survived a week. Unless Amherst was looking after us. I find that somewhat hard to credit. So why, then, do I feel so sure it lasted much longer than a week? It feels like the time since then has been but a moment, while the illness holds such a significant place in my mind. I got so used to sickness, it became the most natural thing in the world to me, and the time since has felt like only a small respite from my true condition. But my illness did end. It just didn’t do so on its own.

My mother died. I felt her go still next to me, and held her hand until it went cold. All through the illness, it was like there was a shroud between me and her, preventing either of us from reaching out to each other the way we always had. But as her life slipped away, I felt my own sickness fade along with her. Not all the way; the pain was still excruciating, and my breathing was still coarse and jagged, but I came back to my senses enough to know for sure that my mother was gone. Look, I know what a lot of people think, but I’m not stupid. I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief when I felt the illness fade. By then, I’d come to know it. This illness wasn’t unthinking destruction. It was deliberate, and it was cruel. It wanted me to know my mother had died before it claimed me along with her. I wish I cried then. I wish I could have mourned her. By then I was simply so tired, and I suddenly knew I couldn’t waste my energy doing either. The illness had faded, and while I wasn’t up for walking, I could still crawl. I only had one chance to save myself, and I decided to take it.

I didn’t see John Amherst again. I’m not sure what I would have done if I had. I certainly would have liked to kill him, still do for that matter, but I could barely move. Against him, I’m sure I would not have cut a very intimidating figure, so I kept going out of the house, following a familiar route to the far edge of the village.

I knew there was no way to defeat the pestilence that had gripped me. As I crawled my way pitifully towards my destination, I could already feel the fever returning, and began shaking so hard I felt sure that I would never make it. The sickness was not natural, and I knew it. It was greater than me, greater than this Earth, greater even than the god I’d prayed to but never quite believed in. How could I ever hope to defeat this thing, this divine Rot that had sunk itself into my very soul? It was an impossibility, and I knew that with deadly certainty. The only way to defeat something greater than yourself is to join up with something greater still. That’s why I knew my destination had to be the cesspit.

The cesspit was where all the village filth ended up, one way or another. Mostly it was the place people came to dump their chamber pots, but over the years it became a catch-all for all kinds of rubbish. It held tattered clothes, scraps of old or rotten food, even dead animal carcasses people didn’t want dirtying up the streets. When times were really tough, my mother and I would go picking there too, though even with my tolerance I found the stench unbearable. I had to stuff old bits of rags up my nose just in order to breathe. But in the clarity the sickness gave to me, I saw that I had been foolish. The cesspit was always where I belonged, my ultimate destination since birth. How often had I been called trash in my life, or scum, or rotten, or Filth? Well, now was my chance to prove that true, and in doing so achieve my ascendance.

With the last of my strength, I pulled myself to my feet. It was dark out, either late night or early morning, but the moon shone brightly enough to illuminate the cesspit before me. I took a deep breath, refusing to gag as the putrid stench rushed into my lungs, becoming briefly part of me before I would give myself wholly to it. Finally, I stepped forward, and dove head first into the Filth.

Filth doesn’t discriminate, you know. It claims everyone in time, and happily embraces those who accept it in return. As I sank into it, I lost all sense of where my body ended and the Filth began. But then, it didn’t really matter. In that single, beautiful moment, we were the same. I thought then of my mother, dead and rotting in our sick bed, becoming Filth as well, in her own way. I still wish she could have come with me. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. I think she would have liked it, joining me in this life, or whatever it is I have now. I stayed to see the destruction of our little village. It was one of the many abandoned as the Plague raged through it, killing nearly everyone who didn’t manage to flee. I can’t say whether it was my fault -- most of my neighbors fell ill much later than we did, and their symptoms certainly seemed typical of the bubonic plague. But that doesn’t matter to me. I got to leave that place. That was something I had never imagined in my life as a lowly serf boy. I’ve seen so much of the world, and seen it change in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. All the while I’ve had the privilege of serving my god, loving it the way it now loves me. I think my mother would have liked that the most, the unconditional love. She didn’t have enough of it in her life, and I know she would have appreciated it for the luxury that it is. But I also remember her shame, in her circumstances, her dirtiness and mine. I don’t know that she would have adjusted to this life as well as I have. She deserved better, though, of that I am sure.

So any way thats why John Amherst can eate my entyre fucking ass. He’s an whole ass fucking bitch and I hate him so much. Eate shit and die, Amherst! State ment ends.

**Author's Note:**

> Added Dan Lore I've thought of but didn't include:  
> -Dan was born in December 1334, making him 13 at the time the events of this statement took place. That makes him currently 685 years old!  
> -History fun fact! Did you know that serfs needed their lord’s permission to get married, and marriages outside of a person’s social class were highly discouraged? So, while it’s not explicit here, in my mind Dan’s mother and father were really in love, but couldn’t marry, and his dad eventually had to leave due to Circumstances.  
> -Dan couldn’t tell you if he’s aged since he became a Filth avatar. He’s pretty sure he’s taller now, but given how common measurements have changed over time, that might just be because he’s confused.


End file.
